Insect Molecular Toxicology

Dear Colleagues,

Elucidating toxicity pathways across an array of insecticide mechanisms of action and insect species is the cornerstone to advancing 21^st Century pest management technology, integrated pest management programs, and environmental risk assessments. Continued advances in molecular toxicology are facilitating increasingly sophisticated insights into the toxicodynamic and toxicokinetic characterization of a diverse suite of bioactive compounds. These insights are supporting new strategies to design sustainable technology to manage target insect pests impacting agricultural production and public health, while minimizing the potential for adverse effects on non-target, beneficial species. Molecular toxicology research is also shedding light on mechanisms of pesticide resistance, which in turn provides a foundation to design techniques to more efficiently monitor target populations for resistance development and to inform resistance management programs.  Increased understanding of ‘omic’ similarity in physiological pathways is creating the means to provide a mechanistic basis to extrapolate the effects of insecticides and other environmental contaminates across invertebrate species. The successful realization of molecular toxicology in the resolution of 21^st Century challenges is achieved when research teams interpret the relationships of effects across levels of biological organization. Consequently, highly impactful insect toxicology research brings together the interdisciplinary expertise of biochemists, chemists, computational scientists, entomologists, molecular biologists, physiologists and toxicologists, to discover new pest management technology, elucidate insecticide resistance mechanisms, and inform state of the art environmental risk assessments. For this special issue we invite the submission of high quality original research papers and mini-reviews covering all aspects of insect molecular toxicology.

Prof. Dr. Steven P. Bradbury
Prof. Dr. Joel R. Coats
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Insects is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.